We the people

or... who's this we, kemosabe?

1. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. Anyone who has ever heard an English person pronounce the word “clever” realizes that the entire feudal order struggles in that word.

One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference … Suppose … a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”

Although it is rare in the scholarship, or even non-existent, to pair Burke with Georges Bataille, there are distinct similarities between Burke’s argument here and Bataille’s in the Bad Part [La Part Maudite] against the notion of utility in political economics – and its leakage into our general consciousness as useful consumers in the social net.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Burke was clever – but he was no dialectician. Thus, while expelling the theorizer from the social order founded in Delight, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order.

Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself.

2. If, in fact, the social order cannot be founded on utility maximization, then we must – following in Burke and Bataille’s footsteps, or rather leaps – question the notion of a “people”.

I’ve been thinking about the emergence of “we the people” and the nation-state since reading Simon During's thoughts from his Facebook post on the nation as being a sort of concept of the people. For During, the nation, however wooly and ambiguous that notion might be, is a kind of natural kind for the people – for an ethnic group. For what we call the Irish, the French, the Tutsi, the Huron, the Japanese, etc.

I have my doubts about this. Not that history has not shown that, given the right circs, the Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to be an independent nation. And so on. My doubt is that the people preceded the nation. The perhaps most innovative part of the U.S. constitution is its self-address: we the people. A righteous and world-shaking performative, that one!

There is a joke-non-joke in the movie, Little Big Man. The protagonist is adopted into the Cheyenne and learns to call the Cheyenne what they call themselves: human beings. The Tsistsistas. Now translation, as we all know, is freighted with the history of the language into which the terms of the other language are translated. Human beings is not people – although other translators would have used people. Thomas Berger claimed that the novel used a variety of testimonies about Plains Indian life. Among ethnologists the studies of the Northern Ojibwa by A. Irving Hallowell has exerted a lot of influence: Hallowell did not find a term corresponding exactly to “person” among the Ojibwa. He did find a number of terms centering around the vocabulary of powers. The Ojibwa, according to Hallowell, did not group together things outside the human in some macro-group that was conceived of as nature. As Hallowell writes, having no Western sense of “nature”, the Ojibwa gave no credence to what is called, in English, the supernatural. Of course, that a concept doesn’t find its lexical anchor doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for the speaker. But it doesn’t mean, as well, that we can assume it exists just as it does for the English speaker.

And because the word exists in the English language doesn’t mean that we know what particular English speakers mean by it – and not the small sample who attended philosophy classes in college. If the Cheyenne and Ojibwa have different notions of the person than a sociologist at Harvard might have, we should not extend the notion from our Harvard man to our Spanish smallholder hunting game in 1990. I reference, here, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, who perhaps I all too often reference when writing about these things – but his one essay about hunting and the personhood of animals is a landmark in my intellectual life. What Dalla Bernardina teased out of his informants was not that the animals were grouped with the machines, a la Descartes, or given some status as useful or non-useful – rather, they were conceived in terms of personhood. They were conceived as in a sense responsible for their deaths, just like people. In fact, the same logic applied that we see every day in human to human violence: the violent often blame their victims for a sentiment of rage that propels the violent act. I will just gesture here to Une Personne pas tout a fait comme les autres, published in 1991, and found here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1991_num_31_120_369443?q=dalla%20Bernardina%20 – an article that should be in the corpus of any philosophy class about personhood.

3. I see that my personage – I’ve become a garrulous old man, an ancient mariner slash blogger – has gone on too long. Which is one of the things wrapped up in personhood – going on too long. The age of chivalry is not dead, as long as geezers such as myself are there to mutter the tale.